Do you ever come up with a title for your autobiography even though you know that your life is, and will always be, way too boring to warrant writing one? "Adventures in Overthinking" is mine. Because it is basically how I spend 99.9% of my time. I over-think everything. Movie plots, song lyrics, how to reply to a silly email, whether or not to substitute applesauce for oil in a recipe, what my cats are feeling when I'm not home with them, the reasons for my etsy sales slumps and which dresses make my calves look fat.

After I send an email I obsessively check my sent mail and re-read it to make sure I didn't sound like a doofus (and I usually think I DID, so then I spend way too much time dwelling on whether or not the recipient found me doofus-like as well.) The internet gives me a lot to over-think about. Etsy probably causes me the most stress, as I'm constantly worrying and freaking out about sales, statistics and slumps. But my blog accounts for a good portion of the over-thinking too.

Take, for instance, my teeth. Yes, my teeth. Somehow I've picked up on a strange pattern. I always receive like 50% less comments on outfit posts in which I smile with my teeth. It's seriously a pattern. Personally, I like my teeth and my smile, but I ended up deleting a couple of the posts months ago because I was so conscious of the crickets in the comments. I've tried smiling in outfit photos a few more times since then, including this morning, which prompted this post. It's probably some weird coincidence. I happen to post them on days in which everyone in the universe is out doing errands; I always write terribly boring anecdotes to accompany the teeth-baring photos, so nobody can think of a relevant comment. Or... people are so repulsed by my big pearly whites that they quickly avert their eyes, and try to close their browser window without catching another glance of my face. MUST LOOK AWAY!!

I mean, that's the more logical explanation. Right?

The terrible thing is that all this over-thinking actually effects my actions. I've smiled with my teeth less in photos (even family photos) because I felt like my grin was making everyone uncomfortable. And even after writing this post, and admitting my insecurities, I'll still probably keep my lips tightly pursed in future posts. It's so illogical (especially because I actually like the way my smile looks in photos!) and deep down I know that there's some other totally reasonable explanation for the pattern... but I can't help over-thinking.

I just re-read what I've written here and started over-thinking about what I had said about over-thinking so I'm just going to publish this now before it gets even more complicated...